Tuesday, July 31, 2012

After a long three days of brainstorming, our script is almost fully completed, with only a few minor details remaining to work out! Storyboards will be in production tomorrow night, and phone calls will so be made as we try to secure locations for our shoot. I know we're being cryptic and all, but our commitment to the Project Twenty1 competition, requires us to do so. It's all in good fun. In the meanwhile, we'll leave you with several pre-production shots of the team.

Monday, July 30, 2012

The Secret Element was announced on Saturday night in Philadelphia. Team Guts Guts Guts Guts is NYC-based, so we did not attend the event in person. Instead, we got together and kept refreshing our email until 5:45pm when the news finally came through--the Secret Element is "JUMP."

In less than a half-hour we had a crazy "Jump"-related concept* that we all agreed on and before the end of the night, had a very rough outline of what our ten-minute film would look and sound like. It was not without deep, passionate discussion, but it's amazing how easily our nearly complete idea came together.

The next day, the hard part started. Are four heads better than one when writing a script? Maybe if you have 21 days to write it. Our collaboration definitely benefited from the many perspectives on our concept, lots of options for approaching action, and the varied and unique perspectives on filmmaking, but then again we also argued for 30 minutes straight about whether a minor character should stand up or sit down when delivering a single line of a dialogue. All told, by the end of Sunday night, we only completed about a minute of the screenplay.

The clock is ticking...

* Our apologies--we're not in a position to share any specifics yet, but I will share this picture from a test shoot we attempted in early July. It's Kirk giving Wally a sexy, purposely misspelled knuckle tattoo.

Our core team is made up of filmmakers, animators, photographers, songwriters, musicians, and graphic designers, so we are all interested in creative challenges. This will be our first year attempting this task, so we have a lot of work cut out for us.

For the past few months, we have been slowly preparing ourselves for the announcement of the "Secret Element"--the ingredient that is required to appear in the finished film--at which point all creative hell will break loose. Since the four of us have not worked together specifically as a group in the past, we've spent some time meeting in diners, testing equipment, brainstorming ideas, and of course, arguing. It's as much a project management exercise as it a film experiment. Oh, and something about fun too.